Anti-Indian sentiment, a form of racism against Asians, also known as Indophobia or anti-Indianism, includes negative feelings, fear and hatred towards the Republic of India, Indian people, and Indian culture. Indophobia, in the context of anti-Indian prejudice, is "a tendency to react negatively towards people of Indian extraction, against aspects of Indian culture and normative habits". Its opposite is Indomania.
Historic anti-Indian sentiment
Anti-Asian feelings and xenophobia had already emerged in North America in response to Chinese immigration and the cheap Asian labor which it supplied, mostly for railroad construction in California and elsewhere on the West Coast. In the common jargon of the day, ordinary workers, newspapers and politicians opposed immigration from Asia. The common desire to remove Asians from the workforce inspired the rise of the Asiatic Exclusion League.
During the era of the British Raj, when the Indian community of mostly Punjabi Sikhs settled in California, the xenophobia expanded to encompass immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.
Colonial period
Indologists
The relationship between Indomania and Indophobia in the colonial era British Indology was discussed by American Indologist Thomas Trautmann (1997) who found that Indomania had become a norm in the early 19th century Britain as the result of a conscious agenda of Evangelicalism and utilitarianism, especially by Charles Grant and James Mill. Historians noted that during the British Empire, "evangelical influence drove British policy down a path that tended to minimize and denigrate the accomplishments of Indian civilization and to position itself as the negation of the earlier British Indomania that was nourished by belief in Indian wisdom."
In Grant's highly influential "Observations on the ... Asiatic subjects of Great Britain" (1796), he criticized the Orientalists for being too respectful to Indian culture and religion. His work tried to determine the Hindus' "true place in the moral scale" and he alleged that the Hindus are "a people exceedingly depraved". Grant believed that Great Britain's duty was to civilise and Christianize the natives.
Lord Macaulay, serving on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, was instrumental in creating the foundations of bilingual colonial India. He convinced the Governor-General to adopt English as the medium of instruction in higher education from the sixth year of schooling onwards, rather than Sanskrit or Arabic. He claimed: "I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India." He wrote that Arabic and Sanskrit works on medicine contain "medical doctrines which would disgrace an English Farrier – Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school – History, abounding with kings thirty feet high reigns thirty thousand years long – and Geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter".
One of the most influential historians of India during the British Empire, James Mill was criticised for prejudice against Hindus. Horace Hayman Wilson wrote that the tendency of Mill's work was "evil". Mill claimed that both Indians and Chinese people are cowardly, unfeeling and mendacious. Both Mill and Grant attacked Orientalist scholarship that was too respectful of Indian culture: "It was unfortunate that a mind so pure, so warm in the pursuit of truth so devoted to oriental learning, as that of Sir William Jones, should have adopted the hypothesis of a high state of civilization in the principal countries of Asia."
Dadabhai Naoroji spoke against such anti-India sentiment.
Colonialists
Stereotypes of Indians intensified during and after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as India's First War of Independence to the Indians and as the Sepoy Mutiny to the British, when Indian sepoys rebelled against the British East India Company's rule in India. Allegations of war rape were used as propaganda by British colonialists in order to justify the colonization of India. While incidents of rape committed by Indian rebels against British women and girls were generally uncommon, this was exaggerated by the British media to justify continued British intervention in the Indian subcontinent.